August 2002 Archives

LBJs

*We're back from vacation, our minds are fragmented, and we're gearing up for the oncoming fall. The wind is blowing out of the north, carrying with it a distracting number of brown and yellow leaves; whether drought or autumn is to blame I don't know. The temperature, alas, is still in the 90s, which sort of takes the edge off the illusion of fall. You just can't make 92 degrees feel "crisp."

*We returned home with a peculiar batch of CDs. I found used copies of Robert Palmer's Addictions. Vol. I (featuring guilty pleasures like "Simply Irresistible" and "Some Like It Hot" as well as pulsing favorites like "Looking for Clues" and "Bad Case of Loving You") and Spearhead's Chocolate Supa Highway, which I bought unheard because Michael Franti is friggin' brilliant. But in addition, my parents gave us their copy of The Essential Billy Joel, which they said "didn't have any good songs on it." I looked at the cover--"Allentown," "Captain Jack," "You May Be Right," "Goodnight Saigon," "Only the Good Die Young," and even the overplayed "Piano Man" are all pretty strong pop songs in my estimation. Okay, granted, "Uptown Girl" remains as irritating today as when it came out, and I've never much cared for "My Life," but I still don't quite follow my folks' logic. The CD had all of the above, plus "Just the Way You Are," "Honesty," "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" and "We Didn't Start the Fire" on it. What Joel songs did they want that they didn't get? "Pressure"? "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"? "Zanzibar"? Or maybe they simply didn't know any of Billy's songs prior to buying this disc... In any case, thanks, Mom & Dad.

*We went used book shopping at Books Ahoy! in Beaufort, where I found Kelly an old hardback edition of Lytton Strachey's biography of Queen Victoria. Short of turning up an original letter by Virginia Woolf, I doubt I could have found a piece of Bloomsburiana that would make her happier.

*I also finally finished Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach on our trip. I'd tried it several times before, but sustaining my momentum over its 742 pages had proven difficult. It's a remarkably creative and clever book, sort of a My Dinner with André meets A Tale of a Tub meets "The Garden of Forking Paths," a whirlwind of references and re-examined ideas, metaphors and symbols and isomorphisms and wordgames. Its topics are abstract enough to give one pause, but Hofstadter always finds a new way to get his idea across, usually by putting it in different terms and having Achilles, the Tortoise or the Crab act it out. The book has been on my TBR (To-Be-Read) list for six straight years, and I'm glad to have finally checked it off, but I'm also glad to have had the experience of wandering through Hofstadter's labyrinth.

*It's time to start dieting. *sigh* It'll be easier when there's a salad bar at lunch.

*Tomorrow is a big day. It's the draft for our fantasy football league. I will not reveal my strategies, save to note that Isaac Bruce will not be a part of this year's plans for my team, the Fighting Coelacanths. He broke my heart too many times last season.

But there's a more important reason why tomorrow is significant: on August 26, 1962, my parents were married in Beaufort, S.C. Happy anniversary, Mom & Dad! I hope the next forty years turn out even better.

10:30 PM

I'm waiting for Major League Baseball to reach down its own throat, grab itself by the balls, and give a good hard yank.

And then I'm going to laugh.

The only reason that I can find any sympathy for the overpaid steroid-popping players is the fact that they're opposed by colluding, greedy owners who've overpaid them. The whole shooting match is being run by a Commissioner with a political tin ear, the soul of a DMV clerk with a grudge, and a conflict of interest so big it deserves a league of its own.

I'm waiting for baseball to fail because I think it will make us a better, stronger nation. I think another baseball strike will show that anti-trust exemptions lead to trouble--that capitalism, unfettered, causes even more damage than collectivism--and will give further proof (as if the empty retirement funds across the nation weren't enough) that economic regulation has legitimate benefits. And it will probably make George W. Bush look worse, too, which doesn't exactly upset me.

This past June I attended my second Major League game ever. (In 1975, I saw a Braves/Reds game at Fulton County Stadium. I don't remember a thing about it, but I can at least say I saw Hank Aaron and Johnny Bench play.) I was in Pittsburgh for the Catholic Forensic League's national tournament, and managed to squeeze in a Friday night Pirates/Cardinals game. Understand that these are two of my favorite franchises ever--the black and yellow of Clemente, Stargell, Mazeroski and the Green Weenie set against the red of Brock, Musial, and Ozzie. I delighted in the bronze statues of Roberto and Pops outside PNC park, and settled back with joy to look at the Clemente Bridge out beyond the center-field wall, a pale yellow ghost in the summer night.

But the seats cost nearly thirty bucks each, and food ran me another fifteen. Plus programs. Plus five bucks a pop for the foam-rubber cutlasses I bought for the kids. I saw an estimate that the average--the average--cost for a Major League game is $44 a person. Compare that to the Savannah Sand Gnats game I saw last week; general admission was five bucks--less than half what I spent on a pretty luxurious ballpark dinner. And the Sand Gnats even had Human Hamster races between innings. Sure, the level of play was considerably lower than in the majors, and there was no view of Pittsburgh, and I didn't know any of the players, but...

Well, actually, even in Pittsburgh, I didn't know a soul on the field.

I know Clemente's, Stargell's and Smith's jersey numbers--21, 8, and 1, respectively--but other than Tino Martinez, who made his name wearing non-Cardinal colors, the guys I was watching were strangers to me. I can't blame the players for wanting the freedom to move from team to team--I wouldn't want to be stuck in a city I hated, either--but free agency has without question damaged my ability to enjoy the star-driven system of modern baseball. The owners aren't without sin in this area, either--if the Texas Rangers hadn't offered Alex Rodriguez ten thousand times the salary at which I started my teaching career, perhaps he wouldn't have felt compelled to switch teams.

So I'm waiting for the mouth to open, the hand to crawl down the throat, and the fist to close around the gonads.

And I'm going to laugh. Or maybe cry a bit.

And then I'm going to a minor-league game.


6:43 AM

In the Low Country, the world moves in the midst of stillness.

Water rests, still, at the lowest point, but it must flow to that point--down the creeks, along the streams, in and out of the roots of the marsh grass, into the estuary, draining into the black holes of the fiddler crabs.

Then the tide catches it and drags it up, away from its resting place, and it is caught and ruffled by the wind.

This is the wind that brushes across the green-golden heads of the grass blades, bending them slightly. As it breathes across the tidal flats to the forest, live oaks fill their shade with creaks and rustles. The pendulous masses and strings of spanish moss are pushed gently aside, and sunlight dapples the underside of the leaves.

Gulls and vultures hold their wings firm, motionless, and are carried on the air.

Nothing happens. And everything happens.

And that's why I come here.

9:11 PM

Status Report, August 10, 2002:

*What I'm Reading: Richard Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. A fascinating and challenging study of how minds fit together. It's long and requires a lot of concentration, but it's worth it. After that I'm going to try Brian Malloy's The Year of Ice. I'm also conducting a Readerville.com discussion on James Hynes' hilarious The Lecturer's Tale, so I've been flipping back through it on a regular basis for the last week or so.

What I'm Stressing Over: It's not a big deal, but our Number One Son just got braces. If I'd had them myself, or even if Kelly had had them, I think I'd be all right, but as it is, neither of us has any real idea what he's experiencing. It's not a cosmetic treatment, but one that's intended to allow some adult teeth to come in properly and let his bite settle into alignment, but of course it still means wrapping metal around his teeth and yanking them across his mouth. We feel guilty that our genes contributed to his discomfort, and of course it's a lot of money to spend, and when we think about the money we feel even guiltier because money shouldn't matter where dental health is concerned, and so on and so forth.

*What I'm Listening To: A little of everything, as usual. Last night I threw on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the last album Peter Gabriel recorded with Genesis before departing for a solo career. It was certainly the right career move for both Gabriel and the band, but I must admit to a fondness for some of the bizarre & theatrical prog-rock features of Lamb and Selling England by the Pound. Today I shifted decades and played Chris Cornell's first solo album after departing Soundgarden, Euphoria Morning. "Preaching the End of the World" has sucked me in pretty much entirely.

*What I'm Writing: A lot of journal, a lot of entries at Readerville, and not a lot else right this minute. I've thrown together a few short pieces which may end up on the radio, if all goes to plan. Whether they'll be on NPR, on Virginia's NPR affiliate WVTF, or perhaps on both is still unknown. We'll find out in the coming weeks.

*What I'm Eating: Too damn many carbs. Kelly brought pizza home from the library's end-of-the-summer-reading-program party today. I had a bagel for breakfast. I've been noshing on the faux Thai noodles Kelly made for her lunch yesterday. Last night she made chicken cacciatore (yum!) which of course I ate on pasta. I've got to find something I like as much as cereals.

What I'm Watching: After weeks of gorging ourselves, we've finally watched all the episodes from seasons one and two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thanks to our friends (Hi, derik! Hi, Ginny & Flyboy!) who recently obtained DVD players, we've been granted their old VHS tapes, and have been able to wade into the Buffy universe up to our armpits, often watching two or three episodes in succession. Now, of course, we're stuck. We've seen the first episode of season three, but the season won't be out on DVD until February, so we can't count on getting any more shows until after that happens. *sigh*

*What I'm Doing Tomorrow: Loading up the car and heading south. We're off to visit my parents in South Carolina and stay with Kelly's mom in North Carolina on the way back (though we'll also spend tomorrow night with her en route to S.C.). This will be my first visit to Beaufort since my mom retired, and we're just not sure what we'll do now that she has 24 hours a day to devote to her grandchildren. The mind boggles. In any case, I'll try to keep this journal updated, but while we're staying with Kelly's mom, we'll be without access to either a TV or a computer--and I expect I'll finally be able to get some reading done. I hope all of you will find some way to pass the lonely days.

*Where I'm Going Now: To bed.

6:29 AM

My alma mater, the University of North Carolina, is currently facing a lawsuit for something it does on a regular basis: it has assigned its students a book.

The book in question is called Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a comparative religion professor at Haverford College. UNC told all its incoming freshmen to read the book and write a one-page paper on it; the paper would be turned in when the members of the Class of 2006 arrived on campus later this month. The assignment is not to be graded, nor is any credit given, but the freshmen will discuss the book in small groups. Some protests were raised, so last month UNC altered the assignment by allowing students to skip the reading and instead write a one-page paper explaining their objections to reading the book.

Despite all this, a group called the Family Policy Network--a group based in Virginia, I might add--has filed suit against the University on behalf of three anonymous freshmen. A variety of commentators, including noted academic Bill O'Reilly of Fox News Network, have questioned UNC's patriotism; O'Reilly apparently compared UNC's actions to assigning Mein Kampf in 1941 and questioned the idea of making freshmen learn about "our enemy's religion." (Note the tangled logic there. We shouldn't study the enemy's political writings or its religion--but weren't those UNC students studying the teachings of Martin Luther in 1941 just as deeply engaged in the study of the enemy's religion? Or is O'Reilly conveniently forgetting that Germany was a Christian nation?) This is the sort of assault on academic freedom that I've grown used to hearing on behalf of those who see no need for education, seeing as how they already know everything. Their objection is not one that I take at all seriously, and I'm happy to see that my old school is pissing these people off.

The objection that FPN is raising is slightly different in strategy; they're claiming that a public university can't require students to study a particular religion, a Constitutional argument that will, I predict, go up in flames like the Hindenburg. The fact that UNC has assigned a book about a religion, rather than scheduling a freshman indoctrination in that religion, seems to have escaped them entirely. At the same time, the President of FPN, Joe Glover, complains that the book leaves out several sections of the Qur'an that some Islamic radicals have used to justify terrorist actions. In other words, the lawsuit complains that the book is an attempt to force Islamic beliefs on the freshmen, while the leader of the group filing the suit complains that the book doesn't portray Islamic beliefs accurately enough.

And then there's the state legislature, which has just voted to defund the reading program. My admiration for this act of political windsurfing is, sadly, minimal, particularly since I happen to have spent four years teaching English to public high-school students in the state of North Carolina. The state curriculum for tenth grade involves "world literature," a/k/a literature from places other than the US and England. Two of the works in this state curriculum were originally written in Hebrew and Arabic, and I dutifully taught excerpts from them to my students, in accordance with both the state's requirements and the constraints of the U.S. Constitution. You may know these works--they're called the Book of Genesis and the Qur'an. And yet somehow my students made it to eleventh grade without having been indoctrinated as either Jews or Muslims.

Anyway, to say that I'm finding the whole thing an irritant is to put it mildly. UNC has long been more liberal than the state as a whole, and as a result it has long had to put up with the legislature's reactionary policies. I'm hoping, however, that the whole thing will turn out the same way the so-called Speaker Ban did. The Speaker Ban was a clearly unconstitutional law, passed in the early Sixties, that prevented any member of the Communist Party from speaking on the campus of a state university. When a Party member was invited to speak at UNC, the Ban meant that he had to stand on the public sidewalk and speak over the low stone wall that separated it from the campus. Most of those who crowded against the wall to hear the speaker said that his putatively fearsome oratory was in fact one of the most boring things they'd ever had to listen to--quite a claim for a group of students who were being forced to attend lectures on Henry James and economic theory--but because of the Ban, he was able to give it to an enormous throng of thrill-seeking students who had turned out to see what all the fuss was about.

In other words, if the North Carolina legislature wants its students to read about the Qur'an, they're going about it the right way. Go Tar Heels!

3:52 AM

If nothing else, I have been a mountain-climbing fool this week. Today Kelly & the kids and I went into the Shenandoah National Park and climbed Hawksbill, at 4051 feet the highest peak in the park. Admittedly, we started at 3400 feet, which is where the parking lot beside Skyline Drive sits, but we did have to put in about three miles of walking, plus the equivalent of lifting ourselves up a sixty-story building. I think that should be worth something.

We've not really visited the Shenandoah as often as we should. A few years ago we took the kids on a short hike out to Miller's Head, an overlook near the Big Meadows campsite. It was a fun walk for me (and I saw my first Ruffed Grouse there when we stirred up a whole flock of them, drumming and scattering all through the woods), but the kids weren't really big enough to handle a walk through the woods without stopping every few minutes for rest, water, or just plain orneriness. We then tried the flat, fairly short, and wheelchair-accessible Limberlost trail loop, which went a little better, but still took a long, long time to complete. A brief foray up the White Oak Canyon trail from outside the park had to be aborted after only a mile or so, and Kelly and I were more or less sure that hiking was not going to be a good family activity.

Luckily, it was just a matter of waiting. Now that the boys are almost 11 and 9, both their patience and their legs are long enough to help them keep up with us over several miles. They're also good observers, spotting things like millipedes and chipmunks and deer that Kelly and I might have missed. (Okay, I did spot the rabbit, the ravens, the rufous-sided towhees, and all three of the blue-gray gnatcatchers.) We looked out on a variety of scenic views, stumbled across a "hacking" box (where peregrine falcon chicks are nested and released when they've fledged enough to fly), and had the satisfaction of standing at the highest point in the park and looking out over Stony Man, the Shenandoah Valley, and the rocky peak of my favorite mountain, Old Rag.

I think the boys are still a little too small for the Ridge Trail of Old Rag, though; that one really requires some length of limb as well as strength and stamina. Or put it this way: the distance is shorter than that of today's hike, but you have to climb nearly four times as high. Maybe in another year or so.

Anything to have an excuse to stop by the Mountain Market and pick up more Double Gloucester with Stilton. Why aren't all food stores required to keep this cheese on hand?

5:56 AM

LBJs

*I need to find a recording of a Screech Owl call. The other night on the summit of Old Rag, we heard a trilling sound that brought all four of us up short. It sounded like it might be a bird or a frog--a single note, trilled for a second or two--but since it sounded nothing like the quavering whistle I've heard before from Screech Owls, I wrote it off as a frog. (It was obviously not any other sort of eastern owl's or nightjar's call.) But now it turns out that Screechers have a second call, what my National Geographic guide calls "a long single trill, all on one pitch." This needs more research.

*I am once again plugging away at Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, a book I've started several times before. It's billed as a book "in the spirit of Lewis Carroll," and it's both highly enjoyable and intellectually expanding. Unlike Carroll's work, however, it requires the reader to plug into its vocabulary and its discussion of various formal systems with a fair degree of concentration. On past attempts, I've had to put the book down for some reason or other and have gotten so derailed that I'd have had to start over--a bit demoralizing when one is in the midst of a 742-page book. I'm currently on page 162, so I'll have to keep at it a while yet.

*Speaking of Lewis Carroll-related materials, let me urge everyone to rush to the comics store and pick up the first issue of Volume II of Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The text feature at the back discusses many bizarre events around Britain, including the mysterious disappearance of one A.L., a little girl who vanished on a riverbank near Oxford, and the subsequent and ill-fated Bellman Expedition into the otherworldly hole which was discovered near the site. Wonderful.

*And speaking of LOEG, rumor has it that a film version is on the way, with retired adventurer Allan Quatermain to be played by (drum roll, please) Sean Connery. I call that a home run in the casting department. I still don't know who's up to play the other Leaguers, but my own suggestions would be: Mina Harker--Winona Ryder, Henry Jekyll--Steve Buscemi or David Hyde Pierce, Captain Nemo--Jonathan Pryce or Liam Neeson, Griffin--Gary Oldman or Tim Roth. I expect my freely-offered suggestions to be pointedly ignored by the Hollywood establishment.

*Today brings with it a difficult decision: do I try to go on a local group's weekly bike ride, or do I attend a lecture on string theory given by a former student who's interning at summer school? Realistically, it's my body that needs exercise more than my brain, but I was hoping I wouldn't have to make the choice.

*Oh my god! It's August! The summer is two-thirds over! I'm supposed to have done something!

5:34 PM